Unique repair service reinstalls Windows "in place" by restoring or replacing missing or damaged Windows files. Only software of its kind.

Cons

Only repairs files that are part of the Windows OS, not Microsoft Office or other third-party files. Can turn up disturbing (but ultimately harmless) glitches.

Bottom Line

Reimage is the only repair-in-place Windows repair service, but at $69.95 per year, you should try other solutions first.

Reimage is a unique Windows repair service that performs feats which no other maintenance software even attempts. When you use it to repair your system, it phones home to its huge repository of Windows files, and downloads and replaces or installs any Windows files that are damaged or missing from your system. In effect, it reinstalls Windows "in place"—without making you reinstall all your application software. It sounds like an ideal solution to problems that start to afflict almost every Windows system that's more than a few hours old—and for many users, it may the best available solution for recalcitrant Windows problems. But before you use it, keep in mind that it only replaces files that are part of your Windows system itself—not files that are part of Microsoft Office or any other vendor's software. If Windows is acting up because of something that's gone wrong in Windows itself, then Reimage may be your best shot at making it behave. But if Windows is acting up because third-party software—or Microsoft application software—is causing problems, Reimage won't fix it. The current software is a hair better than the version we tested last year, but expect some problems to arise.

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License and GuaranteeIf your great-uncle's system is acting up and you can't figure out why, then you might want to tell him to visit Reimage.com and spend $69.95 for a license that would let him use the Reimage service for one year on one computer only—and then you should coach him through the process of downloading and running the utility that sets the repair process in motion. Reimage promises a money-back guarantee if its service doesn't repair Windows, but you might want to stay on the phone with your great-uncle to help him navigate any glitches of the kind I encountered, and you might want to think twice before spending that sum on your own system.

Test ResultsI got mixed results when I tested Reimage on three real-world systems. It eventually performed as advertised, but it gave me a series of headaches while it did. (Read on for the details.) After Reimage was done performing its repairs, I was slightly dismayed to find that it had put back on my Start Menu all the useless links that I had carefully removed when I first installed Windows, and which I now had to spend a lot of time removing once again.

To avoid disappointment before using Reimage, it helps to be clear on exactly what it does. When you launch its free scanner—after downloading it from its website—it performs a quick virus-scan on your system, tests for problems in the Windows registry, and checks for missing or damaged Windows files. It also reports on the brand name of your motherboard and video card and other information that it doesn't seem to use for any purpose. It also reads Windows' crash logs and reports obvious problems, like too little available disk space—something that Windows warns you about anyway—and whether it thinks you're running Windows on too little memory. This initial scan takes about five minutes or less. If Windows's crash logs indicate that the problems you're having are with software that Reimage can't repair, the program will tell you, so you won't waste time and money asking it to repair something it can't fix. At the end of the free scan, if Reimage finds problems that it thinks it can repair, it prompts you to pay your $69.95 for a license key that unlocks the program's repair phase.

Some of the information in Reimage's initial no-charge report suggested that the program had figured out more details that it really had. For example, on the best-maintained of my three test systems, Reimage reported that my third-party backup software had crashed recently, but that the problem was "repairable in most cases" by repairing built-in Windows components. In fact, there was nothing wrong with my backup software. The software crash that Reimage had detected had occurred when I deliberately terminated the backup software because it had encountered a physical problem in a backup disk—and so any attempt to "repair" the surrounding Windows components would have been a waste of time and money. Fortunately, after testing this system, Reimage told me that it hadn't found any serious problems, and that if the system was having problems that Reimage hadn't detected, I could tell it to go ahead and repair the system anyway, with a money-back guarantee if the repair didn't work. I skipped the repair on that system.

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